the Church has never been able to get entirely away from the revolutionary spirit of Jesus. It is an essential doctrine of Christianity that the world....

the Church has never been able to get entirely away from the revolutionary spirit of Jesus. It is an essential doctrine of Christianity that the world is fundamentally good and practically bad, for it was made by God, but is now controlled by sin. If a man wants to be a Christian, he must stand over against things as they are and condemn them in the name of that higher conception of life which Jesus revealed. If a man is satisfied with things as they are, he belongs to the other side. For many centuries THE SOCIAL AIMS OF JESUS 9I the Church felt so deeply that the Christian conception of life and the actual social Hfe are incompatible, that any one who wanted to live the genuine Christian hfe, had to leave the world and hve in a monastic community. Protestantism has abandoned the monastic life and settled down to live in the world. If that imphes that it accepts the present condition as good and final, it means a silencing of its Christian protest and its surrender to "the world." There is another alternative. Ascetic Christianity called the world evil and left it. Humanity is waiting for a revolutionary Christianity which wiU call the world evil and change it. We do not want "to blow all our existing institutions to atoms," but we do want to remould every one of them. A tank of gasolene can blow a car sky-high in a single explosion, or push it to the top of a hill in a perpetual succession of little explosions. We need a combination beween the faith of Jesus in the need and the possibility of the kingdom of God, and the modern comprehension of the organic development of human society. We saw at the outset of our discussion that Jesus was not a mere social reformer. Rehgion was the heart of his life, and all that he said on social relations was said from the religious point of view. He has been called the first socialist. He was more ; he was the first real man, the inaugurator of a new humanity. But as such he bore within him the germs of a new social and political order.... N